"I just had a wild idea. What do we need men for? Let’s get rid of men! But then I thought, 'Well, maybe we do need them.' So let me check."

"Let me get in the car with Lewis [her dog] and go to towns named after women and ask women: What do we need men for? And then at the end I would know whether we should really get rid of them...."

From "E. Jean Carroll, in Her Own Words/The writer who has accused President Trump of sexually assaulting her in the 1990s speaks to The New York Times" (NYT).

Would we ask of any other group, what do we need them for? It's fundamentally immoral to believe that other people exist for your purposes, but there are so many things you can say about men — as long as you're assuming that they're white — that you'd never say about any other group. (By the way, it's white supremacy — isn't it? — to always be assuming that, if race is not mentioned, the group is white.)

Carroll's book is titled "What Do We Need Men For?" and I wonder what Maureen Dowd thinks of that. I have her 2005 book, "Are Men Necessary?" in my Kindle.



I know you can't copyright a title, and you can get away with using exactly the same title as another book, but it looks disrespectful for an Elle columnist to use what seems like an awkward effort at paraphrasing the title of a New York Times columnist.

I say "looks" and "seems" because I don't really know what's in her head, and I want to emphasize the impossibility of mind reading because Carroll's book is a memoir, and that means she’s telling her stories as they've lived inside her head, and she's telling of an encounter with Donald Trump, and we don't know what was in his head at the time. Did he believe he was proceeding without her consent, or did it seem as though they were engaged in a playful acting out? The NYT interviewer asks:

In the book, you write that you and Trump recognized each other at Bergdorf’s, talked playfully about what gift he might buy for a woman and ended up in the lingerie department, challenging each other to try on a lilac bodysuit. It was there that you claim he pushed you against the wall, pulled down your tights and put his penis inside you. But why would you go into the dressing room with him in the first place?

Wouldn't he think that sex was in the offing, even if she's "stamping on his feet, and I think I’m banging him on the head with my purse." I heard in the NYT podcast (blogged here) that she laughed the whole time and never said a word — no "no" or "don't" or "stop." What was in his head? You won't hear it from him, because he's taken the position that it never happened at all.

"I think I’m banging him on the head...." Doesn't she know? It's a memoir: She's viewing the old movies in her head and relaying what she sees there to us.

There's some honesty to the "I think." She's showing us that she knows she can't really know. What are memories? What is a memoir? But what is the morality of all this writing? One answer is that she consistently refrains from calling it "rape." She does not accuse him of a crime. Other people step in and do that for her, of course. That's the world we live in.